He touched it, and it vanished.
That startled me, for it was not of my doing.
“I did not like Cornelia,” he said. “Perhaps we can do without the bracelet.”
I nodded, and glanced at the bed. Thank the gods it had silken linens for me to hide my nakedness beneath.
In the instant before I bolted for the bed I felt his hand caress my back, running lightly over the scars the imp had made, and I flinched away.
“You said you would not touch my naked body.”
Abruptly the warmth of his hand vanished. “I apologise. Now, come to bed, Noah, and talk to me before we sleep.”
I turned and walked the few steps to the bed, climbing in and sliding the silk sheet over me, trying not to appear as if I rushed, but knowing from the amused gleam in his eyes that he had noted my hurry.
He lay down beside me, not bothering to hide his nakedness.
“Of what do you wish to speak?” I said.
“Ah, how formal you are.”
He lay close to me, not touching, but I could feel his warmth even so.
“Talk to me of Catling, Noah,” he said.
My eyes filmed with tears. Damn him. That hurt was too recent for me to talk of it unemotionally.
“Noah?”
Ah, gods, if that care and concern in his voice was forced pretence then he was a far better actor than I had ever given him credit for.
I heard and felt him turn over.
“Was it because she was not a daughter of Brutus that you disliked her?” he said. “You always seemed so detached from her. I found that odd.”
“You never commented on it,” I managed to say.
His voice was amused. “Being an evil Minotaur, I had other things on my mind than mother-daughter relationships.”
“Do not jest about it!”
“Noah, I’m sorry. What could she have done that has caused you so much distress?”
How to answer that? Well, Asterion, you see, I brought the Troy Game itself into your house, save that I did not know she was the Troy Game, because I thought she was my beloved daughter.
“I lost a daughter once,” I said.
“I did not know,” he said. There was infinite sympathy in his voice, and no question. He had left it up to me as to whether or not I continued.
Naturally, at that sympathy, and that tact, I began to babble.
“In my life as Cornelia, Brutus hated me, had gone to Genvissa, and I thought that the only way to get him back was to fall pregnant to him. I did, a daughter…oh, I wanted her so much! I wanted someone to love me. My son was all Brutus’ child, and I thought that even if I lost Brutus to Genvissa completely then I would have his child, and she would love me…”
I stopped, aware that not only was I babbling nonsense but I was crying openly, and completely unable to stop myself. All the emotions of the past few days had bubbled to the surface at Weyland’s kindness (false kindness it may have been, but at this point any kindness at all had the power to undo me). One of my hands, dangerously trembly, dashed at the tears, and I continued relentlessly along the road to utter destruction.
“I was seven months pregnant, Brutus had abandoned me completely. Genvissa thought to rid herself of me, and of the child. One night she…she—”
“You lost your daughter through Genvissa’s malevolence.”
“And my own life as well…but Mag came to me, and saved me, and set me on the road to—”
“To my complete obliteration. Yes. But the daughter? Mag did not save her?”
I had never thought of that. Mag had saved me, but not my daughter. I was the more severely damaged of the two of us. If Mag could have saved me then she could have given breath to an infant that was but two months shy of full-term.
She could have saved my daughter, and yet she didn’t.
“No,” I said. “No. And I thought…I believed I would have my daughter back one day…and Catling…”
“Catling was not what you expected.”
I couldn’t talk about it. I put my hands over my face, hating my tears.
With a sigh, Weyland moved closer and gathered me into his arms.
“Noah…” he began, kissing my brow in comfort rather than passion, and then—
Then it was if the chamber vanished. And all I could see was Silvius, leaning down to Louis, driving an arrow through Louis’ hand and deeper and deeper into Louis’ brain.
I gasped, unable to help myself, and Weyland’s arms tightened about me.
Seven
The Forest
“Do it now!” Louis screamed, only wanting to feel that arrow slide into his brain so he could embrace oblivion and death. “For gods’ sakes, Silvius, do it now!”
Silvius took firm hold of the arrow with both his hands, and pushed down.
Louis tensed, terrified, yet glad it would soon be over.
Silvius pushed the tip of the arrow into the bone of Louis’ left orbit, and twisted, grinding the arrowhead slowly deeper and deeper, mangling bone and nerve endings both.
If Louis had thought he was in pain before, then this was suffering such as he’d never known. The pain in his hand was bad enough as the shaft of the arrow twisted slowly through flesh and bone, but what the arrowhead did to his skull was indescribably agonising.
Worse was the terrible knowledge that Silvius knew what he was doing. He could have easily sunk that arrowhead through the rear of Louis’ orbit and deep into his brain, killing him instantly, but he chose not to.
Louis’ left hand beat uselessly at Silvius, his feet kicking more uselessly. None of the blows made any difference. It was as though Silvius was totally insubstantial save for those terrible hands, gripping the shaft of the arrow.
Thus you have brutalised me for three thousand years, Silvius whispered into Louis’ mind. Thus have I suffered.
Louis managed to speak. “I…killed you…instantly. There was no…suffering.”
There was no suffering? To see my own beloved son come up to me, his face expressionless, to see him look at the arrow, look at my kingship bands, and then look back to the arrow in my eye with an expression of such murderous ambition on his face that all I had ever been, all I had ever loved, was murdered with that single look? That was not suffering? Do you know what it is like, Brutus-William-Louis, to be murdered by that person you have loved the most?
He ground the arrowhead back and forth, back and forth, scraping terrible grooves in Louis’ orbit.
“Father…kill me now. I beg you!”
You think this is suffering? Do you not know that your greatest suffering, your greatest despair, is yet to come?
And then, dimly, gradually, Louis became aware that someone else was standing at his side, and he knew it was James.
And he knew what James held in his hand, and, perhaps understandably, Louis thought that the greater suffering Silvius referred to would be at the hands of James.
Eight
The Idyll, Idol Lane, London
NOAH SPEAKS
Isaw all of this, and was appalled by Louis’ suffering, as also James’ need for revenge. And yet I was still wrapped in my tears and all that long-buried pain that had cruelly bubbled to the surface.
And all through that terrifying scene of Louis’ suffering, truly I was conscious of only one thing.
Weyland’s arms about me, and his silent comfort. I didn’t know if he could scry out my thoughts—the gods alone know that Weyland had the power to somehow sense, if not share outright, the vision I experienced—but I think he would have reacted if he had. I think I would have known if he was there with me.
All he did was lie beside me, and hold me, and try and comfort me.
I pulled back a little from the vision, and stirred. He leaned back, and pushed away some of my hair that had fallen over my face. “I lost a daughter,” he said. “Not so painfully as did you, but for years I wondered if she was dead or, if she lived, if she was well, or if she suffered in life, or if—”
I didn’t hear the rest of what Weyland said, for a memory had suddenly filled my mind. Long Tom, speaking to me when I was but a child, and on my way to my life at Woburn Abbey.
“Old wounds must be healed,” Long Tom had said. “All of them.”
“Old wounds?”
“The wounds caused during your first life: not those caused only by you, but those caused and suffered by everyone caught in the Game.”
I caught my breath. Gods, gods, gods!
Wounds must be healed, all those caused and suffered by everyone caught in the Game.